Mike Carey recently and very kindly sent me a copy of his X-Men series, The Age of X; I did a swapsies and sent him a copy of Hell Ship.

Mike is one of the most versatile and wonderful writers in the field of SF – he writes franchise comics like Constantine and X-Men, he writes original comics like his punk faerie story God Save the Queen, and he writes fab novels too about a freelance exorcist, the Felix Castor novels. And Age of X is a peach of a story. So high concept I can say no more, otherwise I would have to banish myself into an alternative reality or, at the very least, drink a cup of liquid adamantium. It’s beautiful and violent and really makes you think about the characters who we know as the X-Men and New Mutants; and, too, really makes you think about what makes a person be a certain person in the first place.

It’s been a good year for X-stuff – the new X-Men movie X-Men First Class is the first I’ve seen that really does justice to the spirit of the original comics; mainly because it kicks free of all the familiar stuff and takes us into deep origin territory. Michael Fassbender as Magneto totally steals the movie.

And, though I find the movies over-populated and over-frenetic, I am truly in awe at the way the X-Men legend has grown and grown. These were the comics I read as a kid; they’re now a cultural phenomenon. Great stage actors yearn to play THEIR version of Professor X or Magneto…how hilarious is that.

Anyway, as my visual hommage to the gang of mixed up kids with superpowers who have survived supervillains, cross overs, alternate versions AND aliens, here’s some X-Stuff:

That’s as many as I can cram in for now. For the uber-nerds, here’s a list of known team members: